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Saturday, September 24, 2016

Here's a video of my first race in the OSR V8 Development Series. This is the 2nd split and I think you'll find the last 10 minutes pretty entertaining as I was running in 7th with my team mate Thom behind me as we chased down 3 cars who hadn't taken fresh tyres at the pit stop.

Two weeks into the new season and I've had some time to run in the 3 hosted leagues which was I was interested in:

Aussie Racing Cars Championship

SEK Le Mans Series

OSR iKART V8 Development Series

I posted previously to explain my excitement about the Aussie Cars series. While I've definitely enjoyed the car, it quickly became apparent that the racing wasn't actually going to be that great.

The Le Mans league was an interesting idea, all drivers would run each of the 4 tracks for 3 weeks races each; first in a GT3 car in a 60 minute race, then GT1 in a 90 minute race, then HPD in a 120 minute race. While I don't have a lot of experience in the GT3 cars, I enjoyed running the Audi R8 at Le Mans. I did pretty well in the GT1 Aston where I have more experience. However with the HPD round coming up I came to the conclusion that I just can't commit to a 2 hour race + 30 minute qually session which starts at 9pm. I wouldn't be in bed until midnight.....

The V8 Development Series is the feeder series into the main OSR V8 Supercar series and seemed like a good way to dip my toes into driving the Commodore. Long story short, I've really enjoyed learning to tame the beast and have decided that it will be my main focus for the season. My goal for the season is just to continue coming to grips with the Commodore and improving my times. I would be very happy to find myself making the top split in the dev series.

I'll also be running in the official V8SC race which runs on 8:15pm Sunday night AEST time.

I'll probably also try to run in the Kamel GT series race which runs after the V8's on Sunday night in the new Nissan ZX-T, as it is a boatload of fun.

I dropped the Aussie Cars league because it runs on Thursday nights and that clashes with V8SC practice night for the team I've joined.... More on that in another post shortly.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Sunday, August 21, 2016

While hunting around for a league to join which runs during AEST evenings I came across the thread announcing that the Aussie Racing Cars Championships will be running for 13 weeks aligned with iRacing's 2016 Season 4. Sessions run from 8pm - 9pm Thursday nights, which is perfect. There's over 130 people who have shown interest and they'll be running two 60 slot sessions; participation should be very high!

Here's the details:

Day:

Thursday

Time:

8:00:00 PM AEST

Warmup:

20 minutes

Qualifying:

10 minutes

Race:

x Laps or 30 minutes

Distance:

~70 kms

Split Size:

60 or 50%

No. Servers:

Max 2

Weather:

Dynamic

Time of Day:

Random

Start Type:

Standing

Fast Repairs:

1

Track State:

Random and Automatic

Incidents:

22

Setup Type:

Fixed

Week

Circuit

Layout

1.

Mount Panorama Circuit

2.

Road Atlanta

Short

3.

Watkins Glen International

Cup

4.

Phillip Island Circuit

5.

Long Beach Street Circuit

6.

Oulton Park Circuit

Island Historic

7.

Oran Park Raceway

Grand Prix

8.

Summit Point Raceway

9.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

Road Course

10.

Canadian Tire Motorsport Park

11.

Autodromo Nazionale di Monza

Junior

12.

Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari

Grand Prix

I've put in a few practice sessions and I'm enjoying getting a handle on the Legends car with the setup the league has come up with. I even came up with a fake sponsorship deal with National Pies and whipped up a paint job:

I've run a few practice sessions and races using this forceMap.csv file (save it into your /documents/iRacing folder). Like Ed's summation; I find driving when using my forceMap file I get better feedback as to what is going on with the rear of the car. Feeling when I'm on the edge of traction is a huge improvement. Along with this I get a better idea of weight transfer side to side in the car.

Monday, June 27, 2016

1) I totally suck at the first and last corners of Sebring in the Spec Racer Ford.
2) Australian prime time participation in the SRF isn't as good as I thought it would be.

These two things combined led me to look around for another series to take part in. Unfortunately the site I used to use to check on participation across series has broken and the maintainer isn't interested in fixing it. The good news is someone else has stepped up to take it over, but the new site won't be up and running until next week (hopefully).

I had to do it the old fashioned way, it became apparently that if I wanted a series which I could always find a decent race Friday or Saturday night at around 8pm to 10pm my time I had a handful of options:

Global MX-5 Cup

I basically have zero interest in learning how to be fast in the new MX-5. I've jumped into it a few times and have found that I simply detest the baseline setup which is in place for this series.

Production Car Challenge

There is essentially zero people driving the Solstice in this series, which is a shame because I did enjoy that. While the MX-5 has an open setup and I could get it to a put that I felt comfortable I detest a few of the tiny tracks they use in this series; Jefferson and Okayama Short aren't any fun.

Formula Renault 2.0

The numbers for this series are amazing. I jumped in and really enjoyed driving the FR2.0 around Philip Island and I think that this really could be a series that I get involved in at some stage.

GT3 Sprint

Again, the massive participation numbers make this a strong contender. The downside is that I'm frustratingly slow in these cars. I'm sure with more seat time I would improve, but would I enjoy it enough to warrant the time and effort?

GT3 Enduro

There is a race Saturday 7pm my time. I'm actually pretty interested in this, but would need to find a team to run with. Perhaps something for 2016 Season 4.

Proto GT

I saved this one for last because it is what I ended up running over the weekend. Initially I jumped into the Ford GT and really enjoyed driving it around Spa. However it became obvious that I'd need to strap into a GT1 car or the HPD to actually get in a decent field. The HPD has never grabbed me but the new Aston Martin DBR-9 has been calling my name ever since it was added to the service. Participation in the GT1 class is pretty good and I took a deep dive into it over the weekend, putting in ~3hrs of practice and setup tweaking before taking part in two races. I'll do up a separate race report for that.

Monday, June 20, 2016

I spent some time over the weekend working out which series I'll be squeezing into the small amount of time I'm going to be able to set aside for racing each week. The winner is; Spec Racer Ford!

The crucial reason ended up being the fact that it seems to be the only series on the list of my interests which has decent participation during the times I'm going to be able to race. Of course, the fact that I'm really enjoying learning more about this weird vehicle was rather important too.

I had two very enjoyable races in the SRF around Watkins Glen over the weekend, one where I snagged a 3rd place finish after an intense 3 way battle over the final 5 laps. I still found myself pointing the wrong direction in both races, but these were outliers in otherwise rather consistently clean and quick-ish laps.

My goal for 2016 Season 3 is to run at least 1 race each week after putting enough enough practice time to be safe and consistent. I feel that if I can focus on keeping the car pointed in the right direction I can happily battle for top 5 finishes and enjoy racing in the mid pack behind the actually quick guys.

One thing I realised over the weekend was that no one seems to run the Solstice in the Production Car series any more, at least not at the times I'm racing. That makes me sad. The upside is that it'll force me to invest more seat time in the SRF rather than jumping into random Production Car races.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

To be honest; I was kind of amazed that my iRacing Stats application still worked. I'd noticed that the devs had made a number of changes to the stats on the members pages and figured that this would have included changes to the data which my app pulls. Turns out they didn't. Yay.

I figured I'd post up a full career stats dump, mostly to highlight how very little time I've had to put into iRacing since the end of 2015 Season 2. That was when we moved back to Australia after living in the United States for 3 years.

For the up coming 2016 Season 3 I do hope that I can set aside two hours each week so I can compete in a series. Most likely it would be Grand Touring, but the couple of Spec Racer Ford events I've stumbled into this weekend have been a real hoot.... Perhaps even the Ford GT in the revived Proto/GT series? Basically it'll come down to participation levels at the times I can set aside to drive.

With that in mind, the hugely popular GT3 or Formula Renault 2.0 series need consideration. The downside of both of these is that my iRating would put me in the top split and it'd be a very humbling couple of races each week. The upside is that I'd be sure to get some interesting mid-pack action every time I strapped in for a drive.

My life has been rather busy lately, what with buying a house and welcoming our second child into the world.

I finally managed to find time to sneak in a couple of races, the first was a very enjoyable win at Bathurst in the Solstice in a Production Car race. The second was more entertaining; a 3rd at Lime Rock in the Spec Racer Ford.

I wouldn't have every considered myself very good in the SRF, having not spent enough time in the seat to really get a good grip of the thing. Basically any time I get near the edge of the envelop I quickly find myself pointing in the wrong direction. Still, I decided to jump into a race at Lime Rock because that track has always been good to me.

I qualified in 3rd in the top split and found myself in the lead after the left hander. I quickly messed it all up though and was dead last after the first lap.

I managed to come to a some what stable lap time and managed to climb from 11th back up into 5th. With 10 laps remaining I felt confident of hunting down 4th and managed it a couple of laps later. I realised I was gaining on 3rd at a good rate and even though I was some 16 seconds behind him with 8 laps to go I maybe had a slim chance of catching him by the end of the race....

With 6 laps to go I caught a glimpse of him down the main straight and each lap I was making big gains:

I'd strung together 8 quick and clean laps and I pipped him as we crossed the finish line!

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Yesterday I had the opportunity to run a whole stack of races in the Production Car Challenge and Grand Touring Cup. Good results in all my races resulted in me completing my little "how quickly can I get from 1350 to 3000 iRating". The answer was 50 races.

The most enjoyable part of yesterday's races was that in 3 of them I had very tight, very clean, very exciting battles for the lead. For the majority of races in the 50 I've run during this experiment I've basically been running time trials. Most of the time I've just been lapping out in the lead on my own and the only "excitement" has come when people I'm lapping do stupid things.

Now that I've climbed my way back up to where I believe my skill level is I'll probably start running more MX5 Cup races and will find myself in more tight battles.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

I'm attempting to answer the question of "how long would it take me to get from 1350 iRating to 3000 iRating?" I'm running only D class events, mostly focusing on my pet series; Production Car Challenge. I've sprinkled in a few races from other series, most recently running the Solstice around Bathurst in the Grand Touring Cup.